The excitement of new tech

GreenArrays has introduced the GA144 chip, which contains 144 F18 processors. They also have a prototyping circuit board for the GA144. These two offerings intrigue me.

The F18 is a processor that uses Forth as its instruction set. That in itself is interesting. Forth is a small, stack-oriented language, initially developed in the 1960s (Wikipedia asserts the origin at 1958) and created to run on diverse architectures. Like C, it is close to hardware and has a small set of native operations. The Forth language lets the user define new "words" and build their own language.

The GA144 has 144 of these processors.

The F18 and the GA144 remind me of the early days of microcomputers, when systems like the Mark-8 and the Altair were available. These "homebrew" systems existed prior to the "commercial" offerings of the Apple II and the Radio Shack TRS-80. They were new things in the world, unlike anything we had seen before.

We were excited by these new microcomputers. We were also ignorant of their capabilities. We knew that they could do things; we didn't know how powerful they would become. Eventually, the commercial systems adopted the IBM PC architecture and the MS-DOS operating system (later, Windows) and became ubiquitous.

I'm excited by the GA144. It's new, it's different, and it's potent. It is a new approach to computing. I don't know where it will take us (or that it will succeed at taking us anywhere) -- but I like that it offers us new options.